JournalCraft
The case for one typeface
Our own identity is two colours and one family. Not because we ran out of ideas, but because we could not defend the third thing.
BOAN uses one typeface. Not a display face and a text face, not a serif for the long reads and a grotesque for the labels. One family, in four weights, across the website, the store, the invoices and the letterheads.
People assume this is minimalism as a style. It is closer to bookkeeping.
Every addition has to be defended
A second typeface is a decision that every future designer inherits. It has to be licensed, hosted, loaded, and applied consistently by people who were not in the room when it was chosen. It has to hold up in a document nobody has designed yet. And it has to be worth the extra half second of load time on a phone on a bad connection in Alexandra.
Sometimes it is worth all of that. An editorial brand with three thousand words a page has a genuine argument for a text serif. A studio with two people and a wordmark does not.
What you get back
- 01Hierarchy has to come from size, weight and space rather than from switching faces, which produces better typography
- 02Anything anyone sets is automatically on brand
- 03Documents load faster, which matters more than any of us like to admit
- 04There is nothing to get wrong
Restraint is not the absence of ideas. It is the refusal to keep the ones that do not pay their way.
The test is simple and it is uncomfortable. Point at the element and say what it is for. If the answer is that it adds visual interest, it goes. Visual interest is what you say about something you cannot justify.
If any of that is the argument you are currently having internally, we are probably the right people to have it with.
